


Stranger the Better

by mautadite



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Awkward Sexual Situations, Explicit Sexual Content, Foursome - F/F/M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 03:44:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4690850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mautadite/pseuds/mautadite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It… still doesn’t mean we’re <i>dating</i> Jon and Sam, does it?” </p><p>“Well, Iunno,” says Ygritte, “maybe we should be.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stranger the Better

**Author's Note:**

  * For [QueenWithABeeThrone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenWithABeeThrone/gifts).



> Written for round thirteen of the GOT Exchange. Prompt: _Awkward sex_. Title from Hozier's [Someone New](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPJSsAr2iu0). A million thanks to Sisky @cleromancy and Ingrid @stonestrewn for the betaing, handholding, cheerleading. You guys are great.
> 
> Warning for fatphobia and allusions to abuse. 
> 
> Enjoy! <3

Seconds after, Ygritte takes a long swallow from her beer. Sam watches her as the silence turns sticky, spreading across their little corner booth. The noise at the bar continues at a low murmur, creeping in to stretch the space, making the air elastic and thin. Gilly is bright red, staring at her fingernails, and Jon has probably cleared his throat six times in the last minute. The muscles in Ygritte’s neck work slow and hard, the beer bottle pointed to the ceiling, and for some reason this makes Sam blush too. He looks away.

By the time she’s slammed the bottle back onto the table, no one’s said a word.

Ygritte burps, and with one hand she wipes at her mouth. The other she slings across the back of the booth to play with the ends of Gilly’s hair. She narrows her eyes and snorts, surveying Jon and Sam, with the occasional flicker of her eyes towards her girlfriend.

“Complete silence. Wossat, a yes or a no?”

Sam doesn’t know what to say — or more accurately, he knows what he thinks he might want to say, in his heart of hearts, born of the little hopeful knot forming in his throat, but he doesn’t know how welcome it would be. The words sound feeble in his mind; out loud, they might be eaten alive. And to be frank, he’s a little bit on the terrified side. 

Happily, he’s saved from saying anything at all. Jon clears his throat for the seventh time.

They all swivel to face him. Sam notices that he is flushed as well. At this point, Ygritte is the only one not running some variant of red high in her cheeks. She cocks her brow at him.

“Well,” Jon says, looking up from his fingernails. He coughs, and squeezes Sam’s hand gently under the table. “It isn’t a no.”

*

They’ve got something of a history, the four of them.

Ygritte and Gilly have known each other since childhood, growing up in the orphanage at the edge of town. Sam went to primary school with the girls, and by the time fifth form rolled around, they all shared a few classes at least. Jon and Ygritte dated; they got together after she beat him at arm wrestling at one of Margaery Tyrell’s parties, and when they broke up she also broke his thumb. Jon claims that Gilly has been nursing a crush on Sam ever since he lent her his coat when they were nine, although Sam swears that it’s Jon that Gilly makes doe-eyes at every time she thinks he isn’t watching.

And who can blame her; Sam’s been aware of looking at Jon like that for most of his life. Through his lashes while they studied, amidst a wash of artificial light as they watched a film, under the shade of his palm across the beach, the flash of Jon’s pale body cleaving through the surf. Sam can’t help looking at Jon; after years of quiet scrutiny, he’s become the thing Sam’s eyes love best.

It’s the kind of crush you learn to live with, the kind of crush he thought he would be hiding forever, until Jon’s stuttering confession a few weeks ago, in the basement of the Stark house. For the first time, Sam had the answer for the question he’d never thought to ask: what if Jon had been looking back? Jon had sweated so much that Sam had thought he was ill, and the whole thing ended when Jon blurted out a gravelly, “Can I kiss you?”

Well. More like the whole thing began. Sam has several good memories of that night, and they all make him run a little hot.

And it’s always been pretty obvious that Gilly thinks that Ygritte hung the moon, fought the sun, and made Pluto a planet again, while Ygritte is constantly, almost ferally protective of Gilly. Ever since secondary school, they’ve been a come-hand-in-hand type deal. Neither Jon nor Sam is really very surprised when they show up at the bar one night and Ygritte’s hand is shoved down Gilly’s back pocket in a half-hug, half-grope. If that isn’t enough, the hickeys on Ygritte’s neck pretty much slam it home. Sam feels like he’s watching a step forward in history.

It’s all very neat; they celebrate the pairing up of their quartet with drinks and laughter and reminiscing. They order two platters to share, split the bill in half, and take two separate metro lines to two separate flats. Someone makes a three’s a crowd, four’s a party joke at some point. It’s easy, comfortable, familiar as always.

*

It doesn’t feel like anything is missing.

Nothing _is_ missing. Ygritte is perfect in a way that turns Gilly into a heroine from the cover of one of those bodice ripper novels. So she isn’t dapper, or tall, or always well groomed, or always wearing shoes. But there’s no one that Gilly feels safer around, feels like she can be herself around. Gilly’s heard the phrase ‘you have to be strong’ more times than she can count, so many times it makes her feel dizzy: from the nuns, from the social workers, from former therapists, everybody.

With Ygritte, it’s nothing like that. Weakness is as foreign to Ygritte as it is common to Gilly, a wretched regularity in her bones. Still, Gilly never feels like she’s walking on stilts around her, navigating a rocky path while everyone waits for her to tumble over. The hand that held hers when she was six turned into the fingers that dried her tears when the article was published in first form, turned into the fist that blackened the eye of a boy who grabbed her during their graduation. All that she does, without ever making Gilly feel small. Ygritte takes care of her, as if she’s something precious, and not something damaged.

The first time she works up the courage to kiss Ygritte, she thinks about a million hours pass between the moment she tucks a jumble of orange hair behind Ygritte’s ear, and the moment she pulls away, feeling a crackle of electricity running straight from her mouth to every other place in the world. Her whole body clenches up like a fist. But Ygritte is grinning at her so hard there are wrinkles in her forehead, and the knot in Gilly’s stomach turns into a tiny swarm of butterflies.

It’s perfect. It doesn’t feel like anything is missing.

But it _does_ feel like there’s something… there, just out of reach. Something that doesn’t have a shape, but leaves an impression, a sensation of comfort like a good warm hug, or kind words in the dark. Something she can’t put words to, but she feels it, and it’s definitely there.

*

“Ugh,” says Ygritte, throwing down her phone and curling back up on Gilly’s lap. It isn’t an angry kind of ‘ugh’ so Gilly just adjusts the controller and keeps her eyes on the screen.

“What ugh?” she asks, concentrating on the options on the dialogue wheel. She’d had a kind of disastrous first act, but she’s determined to get Fenris to like her now.

“Nothin’.” Ygritte walks her fingers up and down Gilly’s thighs. “We’re practically dating those two.”

She doesn't need to specify which two.

“Are we?” Gilly strives to sound casual, though she doesn’t know why; Ygritte was the first to know when her planet sized crush on Sam started to develop.

“Schyeah.” Her girlfriend pokes her. “Don’t you remember last night?”

Last night, Jon had called her to get a little help with arranging Sam’s birthday surprise. Well, Jon had actually called _Ygritte_ at first, but she hadn’t stayed on the line long, just long enough to call him a few mean names, on account of she had been dead asleep before his call. Then she kissed Gilly’s cheek apologetically, dropped the phone in her lap and rolled over. Gilly didn’t mind; she doesn’t like surprises herself, but planning them for other people is nice.

“That doesn’t mean we’re _dating_ ,” Gilly says, but even before the words are out of her mouth, she feels distinctly like she’s protesting too much. On the screen, Hawke is running in place into a cavern wall. Her fingers fumble.

Ygritte, meanwhile, is steamrolling on. She touches a finger to the tip of her nose to count off each new item.

“Sam walks you to work every day, Snow helped _get_ you the job, you’ve met Sam’s mum like ten times and she keeps givin’ you like, bloody doilies—”

“—three times,” Gilly says quietly, “and she likes to crochet, she says it calms her, she always has extra things…”

Ygritte powers through.

“—Snow’s the only non-Sam bloke I’ve ever even seen you _touch_. Never mind Sam, who looks like someone’s handed him the grail every time you hug him. And we’re the only things on Snow’s instantwhatever other than pics of Sam lookin’ like a model, and a bunch of artsy fartsy hipster bullshit.”

“You’ve looked at Jon’s instagram…?”

“ _And_ , I’ve caught Sam looking at my arse at least twice.”

She says this bit quite triumphantly. Gilly is still sort of fumbling with the controls, trying to remember how to walk. It’s hard to think and play at the same time, because everything Ygritte says is true. Whether it means something or not is the problem that Gilly’s been turning over in her head ever since Sam’s shy smiles started coming with deeper blushes, ever since Jon’s awkward hugs started to ease into familiarity.

“It… still doesn’t mean we’re _dating_ , does it?” Gilly tries to fix her attention on the game, and after a second has to pause so that she can tug on Ygritte’s ear in what has become their signal for ‘skeletons and corpses’. Ygritte sits up, takes the controls from her, and continues the battle. She sucks her bottom lip into her mouth and starts thumb-mashing.

“Well, Iunno, maybe we should be.”

*

“Yes, let’s do it,” has been slowly forming in Sam’s mind since the moment after Ygritte made her proposition, but it takes two days for them to say it out loud.

Jon’s still a little bit in love with Ygritte; that, Sam has known and accepted from day one with a surprising lack of jealousy. Surprising given the very uncharitable feelings he’d had about Alys Karstark during the three weeks she and Jon dated. He still feels bad about it. Alys is a really nice girl; they only broke up because she found out that they were distant cousins and felt weird about it.

As for Sam, well. It’s hard not to love anyone Gilly loves, and Gilly loves Ygritte more than anything, and Sam loves Gilly more than most things, so he figures he must love Ygritte or something. And when he thinks about her crooked teeth bared in a grin, and the way she makes Gilly smile, and how Jon pretends to hate it when she heckles him… it must be a pretty big something.

Jon and Sam pull up Daredevil on Netflix, cuddle up in bed, and talk about it for hours.

When they next meet at the bar, Sam’s palms are sweating. There’s no denying that he wants this, has been wanting it without conscious realisation, but he can forgive himself his nerves all the same. Polyamory is something he’s only read about, or seen on telly, or heard about in Ygritte’s stories about her exes. Polyamory definitely isn’t something that Samwell Tarly has written in his stars.

And yet, here they are.

“Well, cheers to us, then!” Ygritte says with a big grin, and yells for another round.

“Cheers,” Jon echoes, his smile a quiet reflection of her own. He’s playing with Sam’s fingers under the table, and looking at the girls fondly. Sam doesn’t think he realises he’s doing either of those things, which makes it even sweeter.

Across the table, Gilly’s dimples are showing.

“Hi,” she says shyly, looking down at the nicks in the formica.

“Hi,” he says back. He’s convinced that his heart has sprouted wings.

“I’m… I’ve never…” She scratches her cheek, faltering, but the leisurely arm that Ygritte drapes across the back of the booth seems to set her back on track. “I’ve never done… anything like this at all. I’ve only had one… it’s not…”

“It’s fine!” Sam promises, eager to assuage whatever fears she has. “Me neither! This is all new territory to me.”

“I’m clueless,” Jon offers. Ygritte looks like there’s a comment she wants to make, but only smirks into her beer bottle.

“How are we going to do this?” Gilly asks wonderingly. It’s a question best posed to Ygritte, Sam thinks, but she seems very content to retire from the conversation for now. Sam looks at Gilly’s face, flushed and pretty like a flower under the sun. There was a little tremor in her voice, but she doesn’t look daunted. It’s quiet excitement that lights up her eyes.

Sam mirrors the look as their fresh drinks arrive, and they all raise their bottles.

“One day at a time, I guess,” he says.

*

Things change, but slowly.

When Jon and Sam lead Ghost out in the morning for their morning walk, Gilly is there, sitting on the steps waiting for them as she laces up her sneakers. She scratches Ghost behind the ear; it’s been a year or so since his silent looks and careful eyes have stopped scaring her. She and Sam walk leisurely behind as the dog lopes through the park, Jon close on his heels.

During his lunch break, Sam gets a text; Ygritte had bought too many doughnuts even though she gets sick if she dares to eat more than four and she knows it, the silly goose, would he like them to swing by the library and drop off a couple of the extras? He has to hide his flustered face from his co-workers with his cardigan as he thumb types a cheery affirmative.

One afternoon, he comes home to find that Gilly and Ygritte have let themselves into the flat. Jon arrives an hour later, and it’s not long before he’s trying to backseat drive as Ygritte makes her way through a video game. (Ygritte’s methodology consists of mashing at the controls until she gets the results she wants, to Jon’s strategic horror.) Sam installs himself in the kitchen, offering whatever help Gilly needs in whipping up dinner. Every now and again Gilly will slip out to placate Ygritte as she’s raging through a particularly hard battle, and Sam will scold Jon about his micromanaging. 

Once, as he’s turning back to the kitchen, Jon captures him by the wrist and tugs him down for a little kiss, looking at him in that single-mindedly smitten way that never fails to make Sam flustered. Ygritte crows at them to get a room or share their spit, and Jon rolls his eyes and leans over as if it’s the simplest thing in the world. Sam watches his thumb on Jon’s jaw as he and Ygritte kiss, smiles at Gilly watching from the kitchen doorway, and it’s all so easy and natural, it’s a marvel.

Their next after-work date is over at the girls’ place. They order a pizza and watch Daredevil for the perhaps fourth time (but the first time for Gilly, which is useful, as they all know when to tell her to avert her eyes if something is going to get gory). Sam finds himself next to Ygritte on the couch, and to his surprise, she seems ready to listen to his complaints about how Karen and Claire barely spoke, and his speculations on Wesley’s queerness. That leaves it up to Gilly to tease Jon about how he blushes every time Matt is on screen, and she performs admirably well.

Things start solidifying in his mind one Friday afternoon, two weeks in, as he waits for the bus. There are some kids behind him, stomping around, making earthquake noises, laughing. Nothing he isn’t used to. Sam’s been learning for far too long that boredom and cruelty can make monsters out of people.

“Probably can’t take the tube,” one of them snickers.

“Mind the fat!” another brays. Sam reddens angrily, shamefully, and battles the urge to turn around, even though he knows he’d only make a fool of himself.

An encroaching roar takes the decision out of his hands. Sam knows that sound, and sure enough, when he turns, Ygritte’s death-trap of a motorcycle is speeding their way. The girl herself is mounted on it in all her glory, skull helmet firmly in place, red hair flying in tangles, looking for all the world like a thing escaped from hell. There’s not another word from the group of kids; they all turn on their heels, hightail it over the nearest hedge, and pelt into the neighbouring park. One of them loses a shoe in the jump, but doesn’t turn back to rescue it.

Ygritte stops next to him with a malevolent sputter, and wrenches the helmet off. Her motorcycle is a beastly Frankenstein of a machine, made from borrowed parts and parts pilfered from scrapyards and odds and ends from a thousand places, and probably runs on air and great expectations alone. Ygritte loves the thing.

Glowering, she spits on the ground. The tiny old lady standing next to Sam edges further away.

“Pieces of shit,” Ygritte comments, glaring in the direction they disappeared and fondling the handlebars pensively. Sam knows a bad idea when he sees one.

“It’s fine,” he says, waving a palm fretfully, both as a hello and a placating gesture.

Ygritte squints at him. “You okay?”

“Yes, yes, I’m good, no harm done,” he says, giving her his best smile. 

“Want a ride home?”

Sam clears his throat. He’s trying to think of a way to say it that won’t be hurtful, but she cuts across him before he can start.

“Oh right, never mind, I remember your speech about ‘safety’ and ‘regulation’ and ‘up to code’ and whatever.”

The air quotes, in his opinion, are unnecessary, but he’s smiling anyhow.

“Did you do something to it though? It does look less likely to fall apart,” he says nicely. Ygritte grins at him, and punches him on the arm.

“I’ll wait for the bus with you then,” she announces. “If those punks come back, I want them to see your girlfriend’s face.”

One little word, but it hits him like an eighteen-wheeler. Sam feels incredibly dense. It hasn’t occurred to him at all in the past two weeks, through laughter and shared meals and cuddling and living that this pudgy-bellied, skinny-legged, fierce-eyed wild thing of a girl is his girlfriend. But that’s what she is, sitting next to him in a smelly leather jacket, her defensive anger making him feel less small.

“By the Seven,” he swears softly, smiling at her. “I have a girlfriend.”

“’A’?’ Ygritte snorts, sticking out her tongue at him. “Count again, Tarly.”

Sam laughs, even more incredulously than before, but it’s a joyous thing.

*

Gilly kisses Sam for the first time on his birthday.

They’ve been very careful with her, her boys. She doesn’t know if it’s Ygritte’s doing or intuition alone, but she’s grateful, no matter the case. She likes being in control, even for as small of a thing as a first kiss.

They spend the first half of Sam’s birthday apart; Jon got them all seats to see one of Sam’s favourite musicals, but weeks ago when he bought the tickets, he hadn’t known to factor in Gilly’s therapy sessions. She hasn’t missed in a while and doesn’t want to. She has to kiss them both on the cheek and push them out of the house and threaten to eat all the cake before they’ll leave without her.

Ygritte takes her, as usual, and carries her guitar to practice in the park nearby while she waits. Gilly’s therapist is on vacation, but had asked her to come to the clinic for the scheduled visits anyway, interact with some of the other girls, maybe pass some time in the animal facility. She spends a good thirty five minutes chatting with a woman from Oldtown, and gives the rest of her hour up to playing with the new puppies. When she walks outside to meet Ygritte, she realises that she hasn’t spent much time doing any actual talking. She also realises that that’s all right. Sometimes, being around them is enough.

The afternoon is spent at home with the boys; they eat cake and ice-cream and watch all of Sam’s favourite movies. Ygritte mixes them what she claims are speciality drinks, but Gilly knows she’s just throwing ingredients into the blender, making things up as she goes along. Gilly is on the couch next to Sam, warm and huddled up, full of the sweet drink and deep affection, and her body knows what it’s going to do before she does. She places her hand on Sam’s jaw to turn his head towards her, and she watches his glittering eyes and soft lips until she feels like she already has the memory of touching them under her belt. And when she kisses him, it’s as if it’s for the second time.

“Um…” he says when she pulls away. He scratches his cheek and seems to have trouble meeting her eyes. His skin is very warm under her palm. “That was really nice.”

Gilly beams. Jon and Ygritte are somewhere nearby, but it’s a while before they interject. In the meantime, Gilly plans on being nice in as many ways as she knows how.

“Happy birthday Sam,” she says for the first time that day, letting the words trail from her mouth into his.

*

With them, Gilly doesn’t feel like she’s just surviving, waiting around until she can be fixed.

Parents are a foreign luxury to them all. Ygritte’s had died when she was very young, and her only memory is of a soft singing voice. Ned Stark had taken Jon’s mother into the grave with him, and not knowing is one of the hardest things he has to bear. Gilly has learnt all that she can stomach and more about the hell house that she’d been rescued from when she was four, about the things that could have happened had Craster not died, about her sisters, one of whom had been her mother. For her, it is the knowing that is the heaviest burden.

Sam is the only one amongst them with living parents, and Randyll Tarly barely qualifies as a human, much less a father.

Before there were four of them, before they were even officially two, Ygritte would crawl into bed with Gilly any time she asked; wrap her arms around her from behind and make her feel safe, and protected, and loved. And there was a part of her that believed she didn’t deserve any of those things, and it would war constantly with the part of her that wanted to turn in Ygritte’s arms, to smoothen each snag and tangle in her hair, to bite her lips and have her press those warm hands to Gilly’s belly and thighs and all the other places that ached for her.

She wanted her so much, and it’s amazing to think that she has her now, that she can do all those things, and more. 

When she thinks of the fact that she has the boys as well, it’s fairly too much.

A knock on her door breaks into her thoughts.

“Hey.” It’s Jon, in a black t-shirt and black loose trousers and black socks, holding a cup of tea. “Need anything?”

“I’m good,” Gilly says with a smile, waving him in.

Ygritte works late some nights. Though Gilly insists that it’s not necessary, one or both of the boys have taken to sleeping over at the flat with her, just to make sure she’s okay. It’s just Jon tonight; Sam is staying at his mum’s house for his sister’s birthday. He had made them a simple dinner of sandwiches and soup, and had been keeping himself to the spare room. He advances into Ygritte and Gilly’s bedroom as if he’s unsure of each step.

Gilly watches him sit gingerly on a corner of the bed. Her heart is beating fast, but in a pleasant way, not with the anxiety that she knows so often. Ygritte says that Jon is nervous around her, and she’s never really believed it until now. 

“What’s up?” he asks.

She shakes her head. She remembers when she used to be afraid of _him_. He had a rich father, good grades, and the kind of handsomeness that often engendered conceit. They would have never crossed paths if not for Ygritte and Sam, and she would have gone on thinking that the Snow boy with the stone grey eyes was as cold and obnoxious as his name.

Gilly looks at him, picking at imaginary lint on her coverlet, trying to make himself non-threatening, and feels an overwhelming surge of fondness. Thinking back to the first time they officially met, the feeling only grows. _Gilly-like-the-flower_ , he had called her, and told her that her name was pretty.

“Did you… are you sure you don’t need anything?” He says it with the cup of tea hovering near his mouth, so she doesn’t see his lips move. 

“I’m sure.” Gilly gathers up her courage. “I only wondered… if maybe you wanted to sleep next to me tonight?”

She thinks she squeaks while saying it, but she’s too focussed on his face to be sure. 

“Just sleep!” she blurts out after a beat, feeling her face go red. Jon is blushing too, holding up the cup to his face like a shield, and they look at each other over it and breathe softly and the moment drags out until the tension bursts like a string and they’re both laughing.

“Yeah, sure,” Jon says. He reaches over to hold her hand. “I’ll just-sleep with you any time.”

*

They’ve always joked that three-beers Ygritte is horny as hell, but Sam hasn’t had an opportunity to study the phenomenon up close until now.

The girls are kissing on the rug. Ygritte’s got Gilly flat on her back, mouthing at her jaw and neck, and already her hands are nowhere to be seen. The controller lies forgotten on the floor, and Jon gingerly steps over them to pause the game, and then wanders back over to Sam on the couch.

Sam shifts, not really sure what to do. The room is suddenly too warm, and Jon sitting next to him, stroking his thumb across his shoulders, doesn’t help matters much. He watches Gilly’s hips come off the ground, watches her wet her lips and cradle Ygritte’s neck, and thinks that they should probably leave.

Jon’s hand stills on his shoulder. Sam has a moment to wonder why before he realises that Ygritte’s hand is moving beneath Gilly’s skirt. Sam chokes a little. They should definitely leave, probably.

Sex isn’t something that they’ve talked about. As a foursome, at least. It’s never come up — his mind provides him with Ygritte’s obligatory dirty snicker — and they haven’t tried to rush the issue. The unspoken rule is that they’ll all be ready whenever Gilly is ready. Sam knows that she and Ygritte have slept together; he thinks with a ruddy flush of all that nights that the girls have slept over at their place, and the sounds coming from their room would make his face heat up even more as Jon kissed him or went down on him. It had felt voyeuristic the first time, but Ygritte had assured him that they didn’t mind, that it was really hot. 

And then she’d asked him to compare notes on the sounds Jon made while he was being fingered, and Sam had choked on his juice.

 _We should leave_ , he thinks faintly, watching as Ygritte deftly works Gilly’s panties down her legs. Jon isn’t even looking at them anymore, eyes glued somewhere east of their bodies. _We should… we should just get up, make our excuses and just--_

*

Five minutes later Ygritte is pushing him up against the closed bedroom door, kissing him as if his lips are air. Sam kisses back, dizzy with want. His hands fall down to her hips, and it’s a little overwhelming to have her drag them back to cup her arse, but he keeps kissing her because it would be torture not to. It’s not often that he’s kissed like this, like he’s being devoured, consumed. Heat swoops low in his stomach.

Jon and Gilly are on the bed, Jon lying prone while she hovers above him. Gilly was the one to lead them all here, grinning shyly after she’d tugged her underwear all the way off and grabbed both boys by the hand. She’s still wearing her dress, but knowing what’s not under them had made Sam stiff from the first. Jon trails his fingers up Gilly’s thigh in a slow sweep that Sam can’t take his eyes off of, up and down, up and down. He’s teasing her, and she’s telling a story in little gasps of how much she likes it. 

“See somethin’ over there you like?” Ygritte murmurs, kissing her way back up to his cheek. Sam wishes he could think of something witty to say, but then Jon takes off his shirt, which is unfair of him to do without warning, honestly. 

“Yeah,” he says, swallowing. Ygritte grins.

“Then c’mon.”

She tugs him towards the bed. Ygritte lost her clothes back in the living room; Sam’s blush burns harder when he realises that she has a smattering of freckles on the underside of each of her cheeks, leading down to her thighs. It’s a strange place to have freckles, but they’re beautiful.

At the foot of the bed, Sam doesn’t know who to kiss first. Ygritte is draped over his shoulder, Gilly is crawling towards him, and Jon is smiling at him from a distance, and he can’t decide which is prettiest; storm-cloud grey or dusty brown or seawater blue. He’s drowning in them all regardless. 

Gilly gets to him first, and cups him by the face, kisses his lips sweetly. He puts a trembling hand on her shoulder, and feels Ygritte guide his other hand to the small of her back. Jon is suddenly there too, stroking Sam’s arm. It’s so intense and warm. Gilly leans into him ardently, until her breasts are crushed up against his chest and she’s wrapping her arms around his neck and…

The sound comes really softly; the gentlest ‘poot’. Sam would ignore it, it barely registers, except that he feels Gilly stiffen and pull away, her arms shrinking back.

“Oh, um…” Her voice sounds very high and strained, and her expression suggests deep discomfort. It takes Sam’s brain a while to catch on, but it eventually does, and he turns bright red in sympathy. “Sorry…”

“No, it’s fine!” he hurries to reassure her.

“Sorry, I guess it’s just nerves, or um, excitement,” she mumbles into her chest, trying her best to shrink, by all appearances.

“Maybe, but it’s honestly nothing!” While Gilly’s eyes are averted, Sam frantically gestures for Jon, who is behind them looking bemused, to say something.

“Uh, everyone does it,” is his contribution. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t even sm—”

Sam’s frantic gestures are now for Jon to shut up. 

Gilly is going even redder; any more and she might spontaneously combust. Sam wonders if maybe he can force himself to pass gas, to make her feel a little better. Is that possible? It’s probably unhealthy, but he’s willing to risk it.

Ygritte spares him the effort by shoving him aside gently, and chucking Gilly on the chin.

“Stop bein’ so dramatic. Babe, I think your farts smell great.”

Gilly hits her on the shoulder, but laughs and welcomes the kiss that Ygritte follows with. It heartens Sam to see how quickly she puts the smile back on Gilly’s face. Giving a nervous chuckle, he stretches out beside them.

They end up in a loose pile; Ygritte and Sam in the middle while Gilly and Jon bracket them. It’s a tight fit; the bed is queen-sized and obviously not meant for four people. Sam’s stomach sinks a little, and now _he’s_ the one attempting to make himself smaller to no avail. It’s a bad habit, a nervous one, something he can’t circumvent when he’s in bed with three beautiful people and feeling more and more inadequate by the second.

Jon plants a row of kisses across his cloth-covered shoulders before the thoughts can go any further. Sam shivers a little, and his flagging erection gives a jump. His boyfriend continues to kiss his shoulders and back reverently, in an achingly familiar way. There are fingers tracing his ribs and a hand on his cheek, and all the attention makes Sam want to hide. Ygritte’s mouth is closest, and so he presses against her, feeling all her warmth and wild energy, winding a hand into her hair, holding on tight and not wanting to let go.

It’s a little while before he realises that he actually _can’t_ let go. At all. Sam wiggles his hand experimentally. His fingers have either worked themselves into the confines of several knots, or been magnetised to Ygritte’s hair; he can’t pull them free. Only a little bit alarmed, he tugs, short and insistent. That provokes a low, rumbly sound from Ygritte that can only be one of pleasure, and she tears away from his mouth.

“Yeah, do tha’ again Sam.” 

“Um…”

Next to him, Jon is shucking his pants. Sam doesn’t want to ruin the mood all over again by pointing out that his hand is stuck, so he resolves to make it work. Somehow. Discreetly, he tries to jerk his hand free once again, but he only tugs Ygritte’s head back, and her grin turns liquid and warm.

“Fuck yeah.”

Sam wishes he could concentrate on how pretty she looks, turning away from him to kiss her way down Gilly’s arms. He also wishes he could concentrate fully on Jon, whose hand is dipping below Sam’s waist, into his pants. 

“You okay?” His voice is husky and raw, and his lips catch at the sensitive back of Sam’s neck.

“I-I’m fine,” Sam manages to say. Jon’s hand is on his cock, and Sam can tell that his eyes are on the girls. Gilly’s dress is now bunched up at her waist, Sam realises, mouth going dry, and this time he can see exactly what Ygritte’s fingers are doing, how each thrust and curl makes Gilly gasp. She spreads her legs, trying to get Ygritte deeper, and Ygritte scoots across to make room, and so does Sam, and so does Jon.

Sam wishes he could touch Jon, but one of his arms is semi-trapped between his body and the bed, and the other hand is still stuck in Ygritte’s hair. His boyfriend solves that problem for him, cupping Sam’s cheek and turning his head so that they can kiss and kiss. Sam feels his arm twinge awkwardly, and rolls his shoulder to try to ease the ache without tugging too harshly at Ygritte’s hair, and that’s when things go from peachy to pear-shaped.

Ygritte is still finger-fucking Gilly, rolling her hips against her as she does. Her bottom brushes against Sam’s cock and he shudders, the double friction of her skin and Jon’s hand almost too much for him. He shifts away from her abruptly, fearing that he might come too soon, and it’s only after he hears the ‘thud’ and the ‘oof’ that he realises what he’s done.

“Oh no…”

Jon is lying on the floor. As if it’s not enough that Sam has pushed him off the bed, Jon’s landed on his back with his cock straining straight up like the Tower of Joy and his expression is so adorably confused, that Sam bursts out laughing. He claps his hand over his mouth in the next second, but the laughter is a done deal. He makes moves to get off the bed to help him, but forgets his hand in Ygritte’s hair, and this time he pulls her unthinkingly and her yelp is mingled with pain, and Sam’s head spins because he doesn’t know who to apologise to first, and he can’t move, and this is a disaster.

This is, of course, when Gilly grips the sheets with both fists and begs, “Don’t stop, please!” and Sam realises that Ygritte is _still_ fingering her, and his mortification is mixed with a little bit of awe.

It takes a good minute for her to ride out her orgasm, during which Jon sits up and rubs his head and then lies back down again, and Sam tries to no avail to rescue his hand from Ygritte’s hair. Ygritte attempts to help, but mostly she’s engaged in rubbing Gilly’s belly, calming her shakes. 

When her climax subsides, Gilly sits up, eyes a little dazed looking. It’s a moment before she can get her tongue to work.

“Where’d Jon go?” she asks finally with a furrow in her brow.

There’s a pause, a beat wherein no one says a word. 

Jon’s hand rises slowly from the ground, like a white flag slowly crawling up a pole.

The bubble of silence bursts, and then they’re all laughing until their sides hurt.

*

Ygritte cackles about it for hours after. Days, really. Gilly can’t even scold her properly, because once she starts getting over her own sizeable embarrassment, what with farting during sex and orgasming obliviously while Jon all but got himself a minor concussion, it _is_ kind of funny. Ygritte would have probably snapped a picture of Jon lying there on the floor with his… well, with his penis slowly softening, if she could have been bothered to get up and look for her phone, or anyone else’s.

After they extricate Sam’s hand from Ygritte’s hair (in the end it takes scissors and Jon’s expertise; he’d lost a lot of things to the maelstrom of Ygritte’s hair during secondary school) and put on their clothes and convince Sam that Ygritte’s concussion comment had just been a joke and Jon doesn’t actually need to go to hospital, they do the one thing they can all agree on after a semi-catastrophe like that. 

They take a nap.

It’s not the easiest thing to talk about. Over the next few days, they go to work and come home and have drinks at the bar and have a few mini snog sessions, just like they always do. As the amusement wears off, the panic starts to set in, nibbling at Gilly’s feet like tiny sharks. What if they’d taken things too fast, what if they aren’t right for each other after all, what if they can’t make it work? She feels like the blood’s already in the water.

“We should have probably discussed it first,” Sam says with a nervous chuckle when they all sit down to talk about it at last. They’re all crowded around the tiny breakfast nook in the boys’ flat, steaming cups of cocoa in their hands. Sam brings over the bag of marshmallows, and gives them all two each. “Before we tried to…”

“Fuck each other? Eh. I guess.” Ygritte grabs another marshmallow from the bag, sticks her finger through its centre so that it’ll sink, and dunks it into her cup. She gives it a second before she reaches for yet another one. Gilly lets her, though she foresees having to baby Ygritte through her next dentist’s appointment.

“If we had, it might not have turned out like it did,” Jon points out. 

“Pssh, ‘like it did’.” Ygritte licks her spoon. “It wasn’t as bad as all that.”

“It was pretty bad,” Sam says weakly.

Jon uses his fingers to count. “No one knew what to do with their hands, we didn’t have much space, we were uncoordinated, and Gilly was the only one who came.”

“Sorry,” Gilly says for the umpteenth, time, wincing and dropping her spoon on the floor clumsily. It skitters out of sight. They’re probably tired of her apologies by now, but she can’t stop herself from feeling bad about it. Ygritte rubs her back absently.

“And I should have probably warned you about Ygritte’s hair,” Jon adds, nodding to Sam. The redhead in question flicks something imaginary at him. Or it might be a booger; it _is_ Ygritte.

“You’re all making this sound way more serious than it is,” she declares, and takes a great big slurp from her mug. “Somethin’ or other was bound to go wrong, that’s always how it is with someone new. Someones new. Whatever. Doesn’t have to be perfect the first time.”

“Everything else was, though,” Gilly puts in earnestly. Perfect is the only word to describe the things they’ve shared. Her first time with Ygritte, and her first kisses with Sam, with Jon. All those afternoons at the bar, or on Skype griping about work, or laid back on someone’s couch watching telly, Gilly touching Ygritte touching Jon touching Sam. Perfect. She hadn’t been prepared for anything less than that. 

“We didn’t happen overnight,” Ygritte points out. One hand is still on the small of Gilly’s back, and Ygritte presses her thumb into her spine playfully. “Took us a while to get here.”

“More than a decade,” Jon says, looking thoughtful. 

Quite abruptly, Gilly realises that they’re right. “Oh,” she says, and takes turns looking at the three faces that have become her tiny solar system. Just being near them makes her revolve. Perfect takes work, and even when it’s not perfect, it’s still them. There’s nothing missing.

Gilly smiles into her drink, feeling sheepish.

“We could probably stand to get some things cleared up before we try again,” Sam suggests, stealing Jon’s spoon to stir his cocoa. Ygritte had stolen his to replace Gilly’s.

“We don’t gotta overthink it. We just need to figure out what’s good, what’s not good, what everyone likes best, and who’s gonna tie me to the bed,” Ygritte says practically. “Actually no, scratch that last one, it’s gotta be Gilly or Sam. Snow, you’ve got the weakest knots I’ve ever seen from a Boy Scout.”

“I was never in the Boy Scouts,” Jon says mildly, head tilted ceiling-ward with the air of someone who knows he’s not being listened to. Gilly pats his arm.

“We’re gonna be fine,” Ygritte says, and burps.

It’s a casual promise, but Gilly can tell how much she means it and believes it. Jon is smiling one of his little half-smiles and Sam has a gentle flush on his cheeks. Gilly is reminded of that night in the bar, when Ygritte had first asked them. There’s the same quiet static in the air, the kind that Ygritte always seems to produce. This was never just about sex, and it still isn’t. They’ve got history, the four of them, and there’s more in the making.

Gilly spreads her fingers around her mug, smiling at her little, home-grown family. Ygritte is reaching for another marshmallow, Jon bats at her hand, and Sam intervenes when she tries to bite him in retaliation. Gilly looks at them like she could look at them forever, and gradually, the anxiety recedes. They’re going to be fine. 

*

The good sex comes after.

The kind of sex where she’s tingling for hours later, where she’s thinking about it during her breaks at work or while she’s having her cereal and her eyes glaze over, and then the milk drips down her chin and Ygritte laughs at her and comes over to lap it up, and follows the trail of liquid to her neck, and clavicle, and nipples, and—

Sex where Jon lays them down on their backs all in a row, and goes down on them one after the other until his chin is wet and his jaw _must_ be aching but he just keeps going until his given name is in even Ygritte’s mouth. Sex where someone’s finger is on her clit and there’s another one in her mouth and hands on her breasts and all the sensation drowns out everything else. Sex where they all end up in a tangle of sweaty limbs, out of breath and high on pleasure, laughing and loving every inch of each other. Sex where Jon is fucking Sam and Ygritte is fucking Gilly, and she reaches across to grab Sam’s hand and they look at each other and they come together and it’s so, so _intense_ , she almost cries.

They have their little mishaps too. The first time Gilly tries Ygritte’s strap-on, it takes her ten minutes just to get the harness right. Ygritte mistakes one of Sam’s tickle spots for an erogenous zone, and sets him off giggling so hard he has to tap out. Jon falls off the bed on at least two more occasions. Gilly accuses him of enjoying life on the edge, and is very proud of herself for the joke. 

(“He’s always been a bit edgy,” says Sam with a furtive grin.

“Careful, puns are a double-edged sword,” says Jon, rolling his eyes.

“Ooh, that reminds me, I wanna try edging,” says Ygritte.)

The good sex comes after. Soon. They have lots of memories to make and four different ways to share them.

For now, they take it one day at a time.


End file.
